I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this happen—you identify a customer need and come up with a fantastic solution only to discover that the customer is not doing their part by buying it. And our saga of the TaTa Nano is an example of that, but here’s another.
You’ve launched your website that aggregates everything related to adventure travel—places to go, things to do—you get the picture. It’s up, it’s ready, and you’ve had a lot of visitors but no takers. Why is that? It’s because empathy with the customer is not simply about solving problems; it’s about putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and experiencing what they do when they make a buying decision. If you do that, you’ll discover that the customer experience is about feelings, emotion, and meaning. The customer experience map (also called Journey Mapping) is a powerful way to understand what the customer is trying to accomplish.
How do you map the customer experience? It starts with finding some potential customers to study. Begin by searching on the Internet for information about the context in which customers make buying decisions for products or services like yours. With that information as background, you want to find a way to observe or talk to customers in their natural habitat, so to speak. As much as possible, you want to observe how they deal with the problem that you want to solve. Then lay out your hypothesis (your educated guess) for what this journey looks like in a simple flowchart like the one pictured.
Once you have your customer experience map, it’s time to go out and interview customers to test your hypotheses. Remember that you want to focus on how they deal with a problem—customers are problem identifiers, not solution providers. That’s your job. And here’s a tip. If you do those interviews in pairs, one of you can focus on the customer response, including those important nonverbal cues; and the other can take notes, which the customer will appreciate much more than taping every word.
After you’ve collected your interviews, you’ll want to go through them (I like to do this visually on a white board) to search for patterns and themes in the customer experience. If you take the time to do this, you exponentially increase your chances of creating the right customer experience in the beginning rather than having to go back later and fix a poor one.
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